Category Archives: Karl Weick

bonus: The following is from a ConEdison safety publication: I have use of the information that that which I see, the images, or that which I feel as pain, the prick of a pin, or the ache of a tired … Continue reading →

This is an inscrutable picture. I like it. The backstory for this post contains several slices. My friend, Linda Kahn, the great dancer and choreographer sent me a article, from which I’ve extracted the following. Of course, eventually wondering must … Continue reading →

Barry, a psychologist, has on his blog created a fantasy about a conversation between new age gurus Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen. It’s short and strikes the bullseye, and, is very very funny. Great timing too because Barry’s parody is … Continue reading →

Hard-headed realists take pride in asserting that organizations are concerned with real things like profit and loss. To label profit a thing is to miss much of what is interesting about it. Profit is one way of labeling and making … Continue reading →

Another carry over. This Dionysian quality of spirit confronts and questions all human certainties. Human reality instead becomes a flux of images and constructions that need continuous reappraisal. His inherent qualities of good and bad, of creativity and destruction, of … Continue reading →

A bit of synch yesterday: I’m listening to the audio book of Malcolm Galdwell’s Outliers and had reached the section in which the author digs underneath the tragic safety record of Korean Airlines for a spell of 10 years. His … Continue reading →

An organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … Continue reading →

Specifically, I would suggest that the effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, monstrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy. Karl Weick On Re-Punctuating the Problem in New Perspectives on Organizational Effectiveness; Jossey-Bass 1977

Love and power are not opponents; it is our ideas that have constructed them so. — The resolution of this tiresome conflict between power and love requires but one simple test, a move from the singular to the plural. Just … Continue reading →

If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won’t be able to … Continue reading →

If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won’t be able to … Continue reading →

Several captures from the old web site. Subject: organizational oceanography! Weick and Mintzberg are two of my main guys. Specifically, I would suggest that the effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, monstrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy. Karl Weick On … Continue reading →

Karl Weick is one of my main guys. The Social Psychology of Organizing and Sensemaking In Organizations are deservedly classics but each of his books are terrific. Anyway…in the aftermath of the earlier MAZE THE COURSE post, the following excerpts … Continue reading →

In fleshing out the squareONE links page important thinkers on the periphery of experiential learning theory demand highlighting. Weick, who’s methodology of sensemaking is experiential remains a central influence to my own ‘galumphing,’ (a Weickian term for exploration). His book … Continue reading →